Now before you go screaming bloody murder at me yet, calm down… Resistance most definitely WILL feature an online component. The game’s online features have been well publicized before, supporting some pretty nifty features like 40-player maps and buddy lists. What’s NOT cool is that Resistance won’t be using the Sony’s PS3 network. Instead, the developers will be creating their own protocols for PS3-to-server connections.

That’s according to Insomniac boss Ted Price, who was speaking to Eurogamer’s Rob Fahey earlier this week in an interview for the ThreeSpeech blog. While the decision to make the game run its own buddy list and so on is a blow to Sony’s claims of an integrated online service - and in fact, it harks back to the bad old days of the PS2 online system - Price apparently left the door open for the possibility that the two systems could be reconciled in future, saying that “it is definitely possible to update the game via online.”

What does this mean for Joe Gamer? Well, for one, Resistance‘s online component won’t be as tightly integrated with the PS3 network features. This also brings up a question of precedent - while Sony has stated that they won’t charge for their online services, does this mean that in certain cases Sony may let other studios host online matches, who COULD presumably charge for them? It is indeed sounding more and more like the PS2 system, which compared poorly with Microsoft’s tightly-integrated Xbox Live.